Moonlight Sonata
by birthsister
Summary: Derek deals with the immediate aftermath of the Hale fire.


The call came at 3:06 a.m. He remembered exactly because it was his last night at college. His last night of normal. His last night when a toe hold on humanity seemed as important as his wolf self.

It had been 3:06 a.m. when his phone sang out Moonlight Sonata from his desk top and he had swung down from his bunk to snatch it up before it woke either of his roommates. His sister had tried to tell him that dorm life was a mistake, that his wolf senses would overload with the constant din of 500 students living on top of each other. And for her, a little more independent, a little more grown into her wolf than he, it might have been true. But for him, it had felt like being a member of an enormous pack, like one of those huge packs on the steppes of Russia that he had heard about growing up. Only this pack had running water and pizza on speed dial.

He tucked the phone tight against his bare chest to mute it and ducked into the hall. He was expecting maybe Kate, who had been MIA for two weeks now. His ring tone was really the only souvenir he had left of her and her unusual sense of humor. If her lack of communication was a break up, he realized he wasn't terribly torn up over it. Mostly, he missed the sex.

It could be Peter, who often forgot about the time difference (or claimed he did) when he called to play the part of conscientious family member. "Just making sure you're eating your veggies, doing your homework, not eating the neighbors..." Mostly, Derek thought Peter was just bored without him around. The rest of the Hales were either too old or too young for him to bother interacting with, and Thalia had already made it clear that Cora was off limits. Derek barely recognized the area code before he answered.

"Derek, there's been an...a fire." _Fire_. Few things strike fear in the heart of a werewolf like fire. Fire is a beast that can consume you before you even realize it has a hold of you. Blood, gore, wounds and amputated limbs are practically table talk around the Sunday roast. They are points of interest for careless werewolf children, gossip over a fresh kill, and hushed whispers when the weapons behind the wounds are wielded by a hunter. There is little a werewolf can't come back from, but fire is at the top of the list. Even if a fire can be survived, it scars the body and mind in unimaginable ways. Just the word made his hackles rise and his mouth go dry, the coppery taste of fear an electric current along his tongue.

The funny thing is, seven years later he won't remember the rest of the conversation. He can remember the smell of his roommate's cologne, and the scent of sixteen different soaps wafting out from the showers three doors down, and the musty odor of Pierson's laundry in 518 because he had been too hung over to bring it home to mom last weekend. He can remember the tickle of the buzz of his phone against his bare skin before he flips it open, 3:06 a.m. in large backlit block numbers flashing at him, and he can remember the last line in the textbook he was highlighting before he went to bed. There's Nickelback playing at the end of the hall. By the time he snaps the phone closed the song has changed to Green Day _Boulevard of Broken Dreams_ and he feels like someone is playing a soundtrack to his life. He can remember normal, then a_fter normal_. Because after Laura gets that first sentence out, the rest of the world just becomes white noise.

It's quite possible he hadn't even heard her words. The first few were terrifying enough. Just the fact that it was Laura's voice crackling at him over an unreliable connection was his first clue that something was horribly wrong. Laura, who was on the fast track to Alpha and didn't have time for a younger brother who had managed to earn himself a nice pair of blue eyes before he was even old enough to drive. Not his mother's voice, not even little Cora's, who had called him a handful of times to share her preteen angst with the older sibling who was slightly more sensitive than her sister.

And not Kate's, who was like a tickle at the back of his mind. A strange mix of long, lean attitude and sexual avarice that might have been frightening for a human to keep up with but was like a carnival ride for him. They had been hitting it hot and heavy for three months, since he had come back from Christmas break and she had slithered into his lap at the Phi Beta Kappa bulls frat party. He had smiled indulgently until she had leaned in and whispered "I know what you are." He had tried to laugh it off. Replied "Yeah, I'm the designated driver. I'm not even a Pledge." He toasted her with his ginger ale.

There was something predatory about her eyes that made him hard in spite of himself. She licked her lips and leaned into him again, her tongue flicking along the shell of his ear before saying, "Of course you're not a Bull, you're a wolf."

He almost came in his pants right there, and she knew it as she leaned backwards, rested her elbows on the table behind her and undulated her hips. He should have known better, but here was a girl who he wouldn't have to tell, wouldn't have to Turn, and she had the scent of human all over her. She wasn't another were, so there would be no pack politics to navigate. He breathed her in again, just to be sure. Underneath her perfume there was no scent of fur, no smell of musk. Just human and...horny.

Her studio apartment was walking distance and she had barely put the key in the lock before they were shredding each others clothes. He wasn't even surprised she had her own handcuffs.

And he wasn't surprised when she apparently left him, or had gotten bored, or even just disappeared off the map. Their relationship, if you could call it that, had been strange even by werewolf standards. Their encounters had included long hours of rough sex followed by equally long hours of languid conversation. He didn't remember a lot of the talk, only that he had felt oddly calm and satiated despite the uneasy sense that he was spilling state secrets. Sometimes the languor even lasted for days afterward. He supposed that's what good sex could do for a guy. He often considered recommending Peter get laid, but their conversations had never allowed for the segue-way.

Time skipped ahead, blurred, folded in on itself like a contortionist leaving him with a distorted view of a reality that should have made sense, but didn't. After Moonlight Sonata had woken him up at 3:06 a.m. and Kate hadn't been on the other end, jangling her handcuffs in his ear, he was standing with Laura, staring at the charred remains of their home. There was just no clear point from which to orient himself. Not the trip to the airport, not the flight, not even Laura picking him up in a rental car. Just one minute he was standing in his dorm, the chill of the linoleum creeping into the soles of his bare feet and the next minute he's turning his face away from a stink that is almost too much to bear. Smokey wood and baked flesh. It smells like a barbecue gone horribly wrong. Underneath the odor of burnt meat is the sharp chemical tang of fear. Fear can be intoxicating, it can bring out the prey drive in the wolf and sometimes fangs elongate and claws unfold before the human half even realizes it. But not when it mingles with the scent of your own family. The only thing it brings out then is a howl from the very depths of your soul.

They can't look at each other. If they look at each other, they'll be forced to acknowledge they are all that's left.

"What now," he asks, edging a step closer. If his Mom, and his cousins, and little Cora had lived and died in this place, the least he can do is bear witness like a man and not some whelp without a back bone.

"Peter's still alive," she answers.

He's not sure how he feels about that. Whatever he feels, he's not surprised. Peter, if nothing else, is a survivor.

"Did he-?" He can't complete the thought, it's just too horrible to consider.

"No. He'd rip out their throats in their sleep," she says, "And I don't think even Peter would kill children." Laura paused, as though considering whether or not she had spoken too soon. "No, Peter's duplicitous, but this was his home, too. You. Me. We'd be the obvious targets. This was just," she toes a foot into the leaves, unearths a fireman's glove camouflaged there and kicks it aside. "This was just gratuitous."

In his peripheral vision, Laura is turned slightly away from him, her dark hair hanging long down her back and her shoulders straight. They all favor their mother's looks, but Laura has her bearing, too. He can almost pretend that Thalia is standing there next to him, not buried under the stink of boiling sap and damp ashes somewhere in front of him.

"I suppose you're the Alpha now," he says. Laura was always meant to be the Alpha after Thalia. Not just because she was the oldest or the female, but because she had inherited her mother's ability to completely shift into a wolf. That takes power, and Thalia would say "You have the power to rule. You only need to learn how to lead." Laura had been studying Political Science and Economics at Washington State when the call came.

"I need a pack to be an Alpha," she says. She's somewhere behind him now, because his feet have carried him forward without his realizing it. He's bathed in the stink of death but he can't stop walking. It's up his nose and in his clothes and permeating the pores of his skin. Someone, he can't quite place who, a family friend perhaps, once said "When you're walking through hell, just keep walking." He's been studying History at Columbia for almost two years now and he knows the quote is Churchill's, but in his head he can hear it in a different man's voice. It's an even, measured voice. It's soft, never angry, and he knows he can trust it, even if he can't remember who it belongs to. He wonders what the platitude is for walking _into_ hell.

There's crime scene tape across his front door. It seems garish and wrong. His claws flick out and slice cleanly through it so that it flutters to each side like party streamers.

"You have me, and Peter. You only need one more." None of this feels right. He's staring at his front door with no distance between him and the heavy wood. He can see the brush strokes of every coat of paint that has covered it for the past hundred years. He can see where the paint has bubbled around edges from the heat of the fire and flaked away to reveal the wood grain. Otherwise, it looks deceptively normal. It looks like he could just twist the knob and walk back into his old life. He could stand in the front hallway and see his mother sitting in the parlor with a book, see Cora and the younger cousins chasing each other through the house with fangs and claws until his mother grabs one, holds their attention with a look, and says "The house is for humans. If you want to play like puppies go outside."

The door swings open and he takes his first step into hell. It's like trying to push his way through molasses. His foot doesn't want to cross the threshold and he doesn't realize he's been holding his breath until it touches the floor boards on the other side. The stairs rise in front of him but are barely intact. Soot covers everything. The panes of glass in the parlor doors are broken and the hearth is a blackened mess. What furniture is left reeks of damp. His brain is having trouble reconciling what he should be seeing with what he is seeing. He could go up those stairs, take a right and move to the front of the house, to his bedroom. His antique wooden bed, the quilt that had belonged to many Hales before him, his basketball trophies, his books. He should be able to walk straight ahead and go back to the kitchen where somebody would be cooking in the tidy space with the butcher block table and the cabinets that hadn't been updated since 1935. It's March. There should be stew on the stove, bread in the oven, a rabbit or two in the fridge if one of the little cousins got lucky. He can take a deep breath and smell who is cooking. He knows who favors what spices and he can pick each scent out of the air as accurately as if he were standing in front of the spice rack. He closes his eyes and smells baked meat. It could be a roast in the oven, but it's not. His stomach lurches alarmingly when he realizes that the smell of cooked meat isn't actually dinner. It's his family.

Laura is still standing on the edge of the tree line. "I'm not rebuilding a pack, Derek," she says. "Look at this place, it's a tomb. Someone slaughtered us, and I'm not sticking around to find out who. I don't recommend you do, either."

"You can't survive as an omega," he says. An omega. When were the Hales ever omegas of anything?

"I can't survive as the Alpha of a dead pack, either."

He was frozen in the foyer. He couldn't decide if he wanted to go upstairs to the ruin of his room, to the nursery the young cousins shared with Cora, or to his mother's room that smelled like fresh linen and fur. Used to smell like fresh linen and fur. He wanted to walk back through the empty kitchen, one last time, but he was intimidated by the thought of his mother's wrap hanging by the back door. She left it there for the nights that she would lope up the steps, black fur tipped in gray, and shift into her human form before making a cup of tea and checking on him, his sisters. His sisters. Cora. Little Cora who was all knees and elbows, who would never see herself grow into her auburn hair and eyes that almost seemed too big for her face. She never understood that someday the boys would be falling over themselves for the smallest hint of her attention, and now she never would. Indecision pressed in around him like a living thing trying to smother him.

When he went to bed last night he had family. A mother. Two sisters. An uncle. Cousins and friends. A pack. A history. A legacy. At 3:06 this morning he had a ruin.

"I don't understand how this happened," he said, turning. Laura was still standing where he left her, but he knew she could hear him as well as if she were standing next to him. She had been here when the embers were still hot, spent the night watching the coroner remove the bodies of their family and sat in the burn unit at the hospital with Peter assuring herself that he was too far past gone to be a threat to anyone. Her presence now was strictly for Derek's benefit.

"Torches and pick forks aren't a new concept," she said. "You should get that better than anyone."

"But how," Derek couldn't wrap his mind around the particulars of it. Not just how could someone be enough of a monster that they would burn children in their beds, but _how. _You don't just sneak up on a pack of wolves. They hear you, they smell you, they can taste the hint of the soap left on your skin and the murmur of displaced air as you pass raises their hackles. How do you sneak up on four werewolves guarding their human mates and their vulnerable young? It was too impossible to imagine.

He took a deep breath, desperate to smell something, anything familiar. Even if someone could start a fire without drawing the notice of a pack, how did they keep them inside the house long enough for it to burn? For them to burn? They would have leaped from the roof if they had to, cradling their children against them. Or the tunnels. Why hadn't they taken to the tunnels? Maybe some of the humans would have died, but then this would have been a different kind of tragedy. He would be here still surrounded by his family howling with them in grief, sharing their pain, not standing alone trying to understand something incomprehensible.

Smoke. Water. Char. Meat. Lots of meat. He gagged. He wanted to smell Thalia's fur. Cora and their cousins with the smell of the outdoors stuck in their hair. He wanted to smell his human family and every other scent unique and familiar. Then there it was.

Something like a perfume just underneath everything else. Something foreign and exotic because wolves didn't wear perfume. Their humans didn't either. Even Kate had finally stopped after he had commented on it enough times. It hadn't been unpleasant, something akin to oranges and cloves, but he had preferred her own smell better. Cora had tried perfume once, and spent the better part of the day draining their well dry sitting in the shower trying to scrub it off. One of the police officers? The investigators? It had the flavor of human on it, and was vaguely familiar. Like fruit and herbs. It was there, almost imperceptible, then gone altogether when a breeze snaked through the naked limbs of the trees. He raised his head, nostrils flaring.

He wanted to leave. Pretend none of this horror existed, skulk back to his dorm and his history books and imagine he still had a family, still had a home to return to. He could hear Laura, her breath a steady huff keeping tune with the rhythm of her heartbeat. He could hear the scurry of the small animals under the leaves, the squirrels in the trees, a deer a mile down the hill from where he stood, her hooves lightly clacking on the tarmac of the road. And in the middle of all that normal was this pocket of _wrong. _And his feet refused to carry him away from it. The only way to go was forward.

The scuff of sneakers on the floorboards tracking a wake through soot and ash. The polished wood of the banister pitted and brittle. His hand reached out to trace light fingers against the spindles.

"_Mom, Derek got his head stuck again. His ears are too big to fit," Childish giggles and small feet loping down the stairs were muted by the rush of blood in his ears, embarrassment quickly transitioning into rage, his roar of frustration followed them out into the woods._

"_Come back here," he had shouted, "Let's rip yours off and see how well your head fits!" He was fifty pounds of rage and spitting fury and in his mind he already had Laura pinned to the ground with his jaw on her throat for convincing him his head would fit in the narrow space between spindles._

"_Human babies do it all the time," she had said. "I hear it on the news, how they get their heads stuck and they suffocate. But I don't think you're human enough, are you Derek?"_

_He'd been plenty human enough to be gullible. And when his head didn't immediately slip free he had panicked, his jaw widening to accommodate his canine teeth, his ears lengthening and power flaring. He barely restrained himself from ripping the spindles out of their moorings and hurling them in frustration. More than angering Thalia, it would disappoint her, and Derek wanted more than anything to never disappoint his mother._

_She had stood in the entry way, her lips pursed in that way mothers had when trying to hide their amusement behind a stern face. "Derek, do wolves belong in the house?" Her voice was soft, gentle. A question, not a reprimand._

_It had soothed him, settled him, and his face had slid back into human proportions, his canine ears seamlessly morphing into his slightly tipped human ears, his jaw thinning out just enough for his head to pop free. "No, ma'am," he had quietly said. She smiled and he felt is anger evaporate like nothing could ever bother him again. He had been what? Three? Four? When he had matured, he had always meant to ask her if it was her power as an Alpha that made him feel that way, or the fact she was his mother. Now, he would never have the opportunity._

His finger tips came away blackened and he wiped them on his jeans. He was in front of the parlor now. The mirror that had hung over the mantel was on the floor, the glass of it cracked and warped. It would be almost beautiful in its imperfection if its sudden and immediate history weren't so tragic. How many Hales had that mirror reflected? How many times had his mother held him or his cousins up to it to play with the "baby in the mirror"? How many joys and sorrows had it presided over, recorded in its own impermanent way before it echoed his family's screams and their last struggling heart beats? He wanted to move forward, but instead he turned left into the gutted room and righted the mirror, made a half hearted attempt to brush some of the soot from the frame and swiped a sleeve over the glass. His face reflected back at him, a slash of char across a cheek cut sallow with fatigue and something like shell shock, his eyes wide and dazed. With no more Hales, it was little more than a scrap of glass now.

Back through the doors with the cracked panes of glass, right to open air and his sister. His Alpha. The last Hale who mattered. Left, to the kitchen, where he could stare at the door while the basement itched at the middle of his back like something watching him.

He felt herded, pushed toward the cellar. His feet wanted to carry him without deviation, his hand gripped the brass handle, still warm from the fire, and he felt little ticks of time skipping ahead. His movements had become time lapsed photography. The hollow echo of dusty stairs leading down to a dirt floor, and the world canting hard to the side like a keelhauled boat. The smell like a crematorium hit him. He stood, shaking, in the middle of what he and his cousins had jokingly called 'the kennel', much to his mother's chagrin. To any outsider it probably looked like a house of horrors. Who actually had reinforced steel bars in their root cellar?

It looked like a place of punishment, but was meant to offer haven and safety, for both the werewolves behind the bars and the ones on the opposite side. It was space for newly turned wolves, or adolescent cubs whose blood was thick with hormones and the song of the moon, to protect their pack and themselves. He'd spent a a full moon or two down here, as had Laura, in full wolf form, pacing and snarling as he had watched her from the stairs. It was time out for werewolf temper tantrums. Now it was a graveyard.

He still couldn't understand how this happened. With shaking hands he gripped the bars in front of him and realized his claws were out, his jaw tight with control. The gate was unhinged, probably broken when they removed the bodies. _The bodies_.

He scented the air with little puffs of breath and could practically tell who had fallen where. Families huddled together like the last day of Pompeii, the weakest at the windows trying desperately to breathe while the stronger ones, his mother, his uncle, an older cousin near his own age tried to...tried to what?

He spun toward the sliding barn door at his back. They'd tried to open the tunnels. Tried to open tunnels that were never closed. Never sealed. He and his cousins had played in them as children, running through the narrow warren and using their sense of smell to get back. Playing blind hide and seek without flashlights. Sneaking out in the middle of the night. It was something they did as soon as they were old enough to lunge forward on all fours, toddlers carried downstairs to play by older siblings expected to care for them just as they would be expected to look out for the weakest members of their pack when they were grown. He and Laura had carried Cora down here. His eyes darted to a corner, a pocket of dirt and stone where he knew she had curled into a ball, like a dog with her tail tipped over nose, and succumbed.

He could still hear the panic in the air. Smell the fear and confusion when their last escape was, what? Blocked? He strode to the door on its rollers and rail and jerked it open. It slid easily exposing the long tunnel stretching before him like a mine shaft, dirt walls seemingly intact, cross beams still standing and joists undamaged. It should have led them out, dumped them in a cave deep in the Beacon Hills Reserve where they would have watched the blaze safely from afar. Even if it had caved in deeper than he could see, it should have offered them refuge, the door a fire break even when the fire spread to the basement itself.

He tried to step into the tunnel, intending to follow it to its end, find some answer, some clue as to what had really killed his family. He found his foot immersed in the same inertia he had experienced trying to step over the threshold, as though he were trying to trudge through molasses. He dropped to all fours and roared, heard Laura answer him from outside. He leaned forward, his legs pressing for leverage as his face pressed into a force that pressed back. It was as though space ceased to exist an inch in front of his own nose. He felt his whole face change, like a wrinkle, a scowl, as his teeth lengthened and his jaw thickened. Claws sprouted from his fingertips and he dug into the earth. It felt no different than changing his expression, but he knew he was a wolf now, crouched in a mass grave, surrounded by the ghosts of everything he loved. Unable to press forward.

He sniffed at the ground; more burned flesh, burnt hair, so thick and heavy it was like a living thing that filled him, along with the scents of a dozen humans who were probably the the firemen, the investigators, and underneath that something almost...familiar. Familiar but out of context. Something sweet, the barest hint of orange and cloves. Almost like a perfume. He breathed deep and felt an inertia wash over him, a disparate calm. He shook his head to clear it. How could he be calm at a time like this. There was no peace here. There was nothing. He was alone for the first time in his life. He shuffled backwards, his back arching like an animal with his hackles raised. The Human intellect warred with animal instinct.

He squatted on his haunches in the middle of the cellar and howled until his throat was raw, until he choked on his own voice and he heard Laura bound into the woods on four legs, her cries receding as she answered him note for note. It all seemed so clear now, like an epiphany. Like he were sitting in the middle of the horror itself as his family died around him.

The fire had woken them from their beds, but whatever kept them from fleeing out the front door had kept them in this basement, too. Unable to get out of the house, every one of them would have rushed down here, the children pushed before the adults, the smaller weaker ones protected from the flames and the crashing timbers. When they couldn't escape through the tunnels, they had hunkered, hoping to either wait the blaze out or counting on their pack leaders to free them. Neither had happened. There was that scent again, it wrapped around his brain and made him want to remember something while it simultaneously sapped all the will from his bones. More than being unable to physically cross the threshold to freedom, there was something down here that had caused them to sit and simply wait for their deaths. Laura had been right. Torches and pitch forks. Mountain ash and magic.

He didn't know how long he spent grappling with the evidence, but the sun had dipped low in the sky and day was slowly slipping into twilight before he struggled to his feet and staggered for the stairs. He climbed them, hand over hand, head hanging between his shoulders as though it were too heavy for his neck to hold. He paused at the top step, overwhelmed by the smell of burnt bacon and overcooked ham. Peter.

By the time he pushed through the Mountain ash barrier at the front door, Laura was sitting under a tree, the smell of fur still clinging to her skin.

"You felt it too." She said it not so much looking at him as through him.

He nodded. When it was fresh, the Mountain ash would have been impossible for a wolf to pass. Dispersed by fire, water, and dozens of human feet, now it was just a shadow of an obstacle mimicking his own reluctance.

"Then you know why we're done here." He nodded again. If someone had gone through this much trouble to rid Beacon Hills of a pack as old as theirs, it wouldn't be safe for a Hale here ever again. It didn't matter that their Alpha, his mother, had insisted that they were all educated. That she had said times had changed and being that family sitting alone quietly in the woods would attract more attention that going out into the world. It didn't matter that she had insisted that their humanity was as much a gift as their wolves. None of it mattered anymore.

"Peter?" he asked.

"Safe enough in the hospital. He's no threat to anyone in his condition, and if he survives, no one will burn down a whole convalescent home just to pick him off."

"Us?" He shivered with exhaustion.

"We can stay on until all the legal stuff is dealt with. Mom's will, the trust funds, insurance settlements. It would be suspicious to come after us again this soon. It's more likely we'll suffer some unfortunate accident down the line."

The last two Hales. The statement sounded like nonsense, a garble of words inside his head. He might as well have been reciting Jabberwocky to himself. "What about after that?"

"You go your way, I'll go mine. It'll be safer for us."

"Don't you care who did this? Who locked them in and," Derek dipped his chin to his chest, tried to pull himself together. "Don't you care that they killed children too young to have even cut their teeth let alone hurt anyone?"

"What I think doesn't matter anymore. Nothing really matters anymore." Despite his rising anger, her words mirrored his thoughts. Without their family, without their pack, what really mattered anymore? "The investigators are going to call it an electrical fire that started in a kitchen that hasn't been updated since they installed indoor plumbing. We'll take the insurance money, we'll go somewhere else, we'll forget we ever had a pack if we want to keep our own hearts beating."

"What's the point without a pack?"

Laura stood up and brushed off her pants. "You say that now, Derek, but someday you'll be thankful just to be alive."

He had waited for that moment. Waited for 6 years. Waited to wake up in the morning and feel the sun on his face and feel thankful for it. But all he felt was wary, suspicious of what each day would bring. He spent his nights with one ear cocked, dozing fitfully between dreams of his mother dying shocked and still by the tunnels, physically or mystically drugged, of Peter clawing his way to the top of the stairs where his skin crisped and sizzled like bacon cooking on Sunday morning. He dreamed of Cora curled and cowering in her corner and of the little ones who hopefully succumbed to smoke before the skin baked off their small bodies. Every human he met was a Hunter lying in wait. He never went back to school, never cleaned out his dorm, never tried to pretend to be normal again. Normal ended, and the rest of his life began.

The clock on his cell phone read 4:08 pm when the call came. He juggled his shopping bags and fumbled in his coat pocket for the phone. The carton of eggs tumbled out of the top and landed like a dead thing on the sidewalk in front of him. He sighed and kicked it aside, tucking the phone awkwardly between his ear and his shoulder as he walked.

He missed the call, but listened to the voice mail his sister left. "Derek, it's me. I think, I think I found something. I'm going back. I'm going home." The world shifted, canting hard to the left and the sounds distorting like a radio between stations.

What choice did he have but to follow? He belonged with his Alpha, even if they didn't belong anywhere else.

The sun slid across the sky, the moon sang through his blood, and the days flipped forward, tumbling against each other blurry and undefined.

Laura was dead, everyone he loved abandoning him for a grave, and even the trees echoed with uncommon silence as though they mourned with him. Against all better judgement he longed for contact; human, wolf, other. It was 3:06 pm when he smelled them in his backyard, his woods, his territory.

He heard them approach like a couple of blind elephants trampling everything in their path. It took no effort to find them. The cub who smelled oddly like family, like pack. Like a brother, newly minted and dangerous. And the other awash in adolescent hormones, cheap soap, something minty and the chicken nuggets he had eaten for lunch. Derek felt their conversation like an unwelcome vibrato along his skin, their words full of belonging and not belonging. Two lost boys in the woods should have raised his hackles like prey crossing his path, but instead they were a sensory photograph of strangers with familiar features. More than the wolf scent coming off the darker one in ripples and waves, there was a feeling of familiarity, even if he didn't _know _them. It was like looking at old photographs and recognizing the familial resemblance even if he didn't know the names.

They were locals, a bit younger than himself. He'd probably seen them playing in the sandbox, crossed paths with them on the street, caught their scent on the basketball court when they were young enough to smell more like their parents than themselves. They already knew all about him from the newspaper and the rumor mill. His tragedy had become part of their urban legend.

A moment of understanding, of recognition clicked for him. That one, the one scented so much like prey he even had a bullseye painted on his shirt, that one smelled like the sheriff. The sheriff's _son?_ With a _wolf?_ Centuries of carefully cultivated anonymity laid to waste by a pack of two. His mother would be rolling in her grave, if there had been enough of her left to bury.

Derek fingered the asthma inhaler in his coat pocket. It had been easy to find, too. He could smell the medicinal wrongness of it under the wet leaves and the oniony notes of animal fear. He was tempted to keep the inhaler, turn and walk away without ever letting the boys know he had seen them, and throw it away at his first opportunity. It wasn't like the boy would need it anymore. The lingering scent of illness on the new wolf wafted away in the chill air as something more profound than just magic rewrote his whole self at the cellular level. Derek's whole world was a sensory Polariod and standing in the middle of it right now were two kids who had no business photobombing his life.

Derek couldn't ignore them even as much as he wanted to get rid of them. He wanted to give in to his animal side and drive them off his land, snap at their heels like a rabid dog and alternately pin the young wolf to the ground with fangs at his throat, whisper, "You're mine, now." Really, whether the newly turned wolf knew it yet or not, he was. If Derek were honest with himself he would see he needed a pack, at the very least a companion. Anyone besides a catatonic uncle who probably didn't even understand his own nature anymore than he understood Derek's. What he fooled himself into thinking was that he needed information, he needed this bitten interloper to lead him to his sister's killer, needed him to find the Alpha to steal power from or to follow. He rationalized the tamping down of his rage with a litany of needs that only served to mask what was in his heart. He was alone, but he didn't have to be.

He strained against the bounds of his anger, let these strangers into his world, and started over.


End file.
